Three Lessons Marketers Can Learn From College Social Media Successes

Christopher is Head of PR, Americas for Meltwater. He is a San Francisco Ballet associate trustee and a Wearable IoT World mentor.

With the school year underway and before traditional college rankings are delivered en masse, there's a new metric that prospective students are considering before casting their applications next fall: Which schools have the highest grades on Twitter? But prospective students aren't the only ones who should be paying attention; your brand can look to university social accounts to improve your own social media efforts.

At a time when the world's leading brands put millions of dollars into improving their marketing strategies, a university's social media score is no longer something to be ignored. It may seem trivial, but when you get down to it, considering college social rankings is a key part of understanding social media savviness in general.

Meltwater, where I work as head of PR, applied media analytics to rank the social media scores of the top 150 colleges in the country. Specifically, how are these schools using Twitter as extensions of their academic profiles and as snapshots of their community engagement? (Note: Our products and services are employed by several academic institutions, including some mentioned in the report.) We wanted to examine how these universities engage with their myriad constituencies, and to provide insights into the best practices as a tool for all universities and brands. After crunching the data, here are the top five:

University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Texas A&M University - College Station

University of Texas - Austin

Syracuse University

What accounts for these colleges' successes and digital savvy, and more importantly, what can we as marketers and communications professionals learn from them? It's important to take the initiative: Today's students are tomorrow's business and thought leaders.

Find Your Zeitgeist

One question I ask my colleagues and clients is, "Can you tap into the zeitgeist?" Trends that are embraced socially become dominant beliefs and ideas, and making decisions based on these trends is quickly becoming a winning marketing strategy. Trending terms are more than ephemeral; when viewed and analyzed, they can predict business and marketing trends.

When I ask people if they can tap into the zeitgeist, I’m asking them to pay close attention to what happened, what is happening, and the indicators (quantitative and qualitative) that illustrate what is likely to happen. Reactive marketing is a thing of the past. Seizing the marketing moment comes from keenly observing external data points, the business equivalent of playing where the hockey puck is going to be. Colleges that grow large and powerful bodies of social ambassadors don't tweet ad nauseam, they reply to relevant conversations. They don't overwhelm social platforms with an abundance of content, they analyze content that resonates and apply that analysis to topics likely to resonate in the future.

UNC (one of the universities that uses our software) took advantage of the zeitgeist when the university leveraged its NCAA Championship win to outperform other schools as a socially trending brand. But even after this event concluded, UNC continued to demonstrate its social media prowess. Throughout the year, UNC curated content with on-brand hashtags, such as #UNCSpring, for students to engage and post photos of their campus and school spirit. UNC’s high-performance social marketing was reflected in its ability to ride the coattails of a successful event, then adjust their focus onto shareable experiences based on what subjects were poised to become trending.